Not a story: FAQ for The Two Year Emperor
by EagleJarl
Summary: SPOILERS! As the title says, this isn't a story. It's responses to various questions and/or anonymous reviews for The Two Year Emperor.


The following is apropos of my story, "The Two Year Emperor". All rules quotes are from d20srd. org unless otherwise noted. This is the canonical source of rules data aside from the actual books.

Some questions come up repeatedly in the reviews and in the discussion on Reddit's /r/rational forum, where I post and respond about each week's update. Also, some people post guest reviews where they ask questions; I can't respond to a guest review, so I'll answer some of them here.

_You may want to follow this document; I will be updating it periodically._

Without further ado, the answers:

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><p><strong>Review by: Someone or Other; chapter 81; January 14, 2015<strong>

_[H]ow, in this scene, does [Suze] start off wanting to set the gnomes free, but then change her mind in response to the effect of their worship upon her? If she is "good" aligned, she shouldn't change her mind, and if she is "evil" aligned, she should be happy to see the torture from the beginning, I think. But perhaps she is "neutral" aligned? _

Suze started off Neutral Good in Book One. Alignments in D&D, however, can change depending on the character's actions. Since become Death Suze has been torturing people, sorta-kinda-accidentally killing people, and is now approving of torture because it gets her the worship she needs to survive. She's pretty much gone over to the Dark Side.

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><p><strong>Review by: Someone or Other; chapter 69; January 12, 2015<strong>

_Ok, I just got up to the "Suze kills Death" scene in my re-read, and I find myself a bit puzzled. Everyone else had all their weapons and tools taken away from them in the Receiving Room. There was no possibility of hiding anything, because they were all thoroughly Mindscraped. So how was Suze still able to pull this stunt? _

See below under 'How did Suze defeat Neklos?'

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><p><strong>Review posted by: Rules Lawyer on chapter 34<strong>

_I hate to rain on your parade, but I'm pretty sure that Wish has a limit on the gold piece value of items it can wish up [...]_

Nope. Among its other powers, Wish has: "Create a nonmagical item of up to 25,000 gp in value" and "Create a magic item, or add to the powers of an existing magic item." There's a GP limit on creating **nonmagical** items. There's no limit on creating magical ones.

_2. What's paying for the material cost and the XP cost of the Permenancy? Stored XP sure, but there's a limit on that (wishes are not totally unlimited I don't think), and you'd run out fast, especially with ignoring the diamond dust cost._

You mean the Eternal Hourglass? Magic items don't require expenditure of XP or material components in order to pay for their effects. (There are some edge cases related to items that cast Wish, but those aren't important here.)

_3. Why not just use something with the rings? Heck, you could make electromagnetic railguns, and convert energy over time into a single burst. Have several people cranking generators and storing it in a capacitor, then shooting a lance of iron, and you have something that works like a ballista, only way way stronger._

Well, for one thing, making a capcitor big enough to hold that amount of energy isn't feasible at that tech level without using magic. If you're going to use magic anyway, the Shrink Item approach is better—it has an enormously faster rate of fire, requires fewer people, and makes the cannon easy to transport.

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><p><strong>How did Suze defeat Neklos?<strong>

Here's what Suze did:

1. Pull a spell component from her pouch. (free action, takes zero time)  
>2. Cast Plane Shift (standard action, you only get one per round)<br>3. Cast Celerity (immediate action, provides a readied action that can be used to cast another spell)  
>4. Using that readied action, cast Polymorph Any Object (PAO) to create a black hole. At and inside the event horizon of a black hole, time dilates—effectively, it doesn't pass from the perspective of the outside world. As such, Neklos is stuck there, forever.<p>

The way readied actions work is that they interrupt another action zero time before that action happens. Because of this, a series of actions and readied actions resolves last-to-first. So, here's what actually happened:

1. The PAO went off, creating a black hole which would have trapped them in time dilation (which is what happened to Neklos)...  
>2. Zero time later, the Plane Shift went off, dragging Suze and Jake (whom she was holding on to) out of the room and back to the Prime Material...<br>3. Zero time later, as they were in the middle of Plane Shifting, she threw a piece of antimatter into the room.

Where did the AM come from? Well, every wizard has a spell component pouch. "[A] spell component pouch is assumed to [contain] all the material components and focuses needed for spellcasting, except for those components that have a specific cost, divine focuses, and focuses that wouldn't fit in a pouch. "

The material component for the spell Major Creation (which is based off of Minor Creation and therefore has the same material component) is "A tiny piece of matter of the same sort of item you plan to create" So, if you want to use Major Creation to produce antimatter, that means that your spell component pouch somehow contains antimatter...but hasn't blown up because _rules_. A spell component pouch isn't magical, so it wasn't disrupted by the Disjunctions that the heroes were hit with back in the Receiving Room.

The reason for the AM was to destroy the gems that were trapping everyone's souls (and material bodies), and then to destroy those material bodies. With them dead, they can be resurrected from outside the hole.

Neklos isn't dead, and he will Plane Shift out of the black hole and back to the Prime Material next round. Of course, what he thinks of as "next round" will be several trillion years (or more) in the outside universe...

Finally, the reason she was able to do all this before Neklos could do anything was because she caught him in a surprise round. He wasn't aware that she was a combatant, so he was caught flat-footed and unable to take any actions.

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><p><strong>Why didn't the antimatter explode in Suze's hand?<strong>

It was in contact with her for zero time before the Plane Shift got her out of there. As such, there was no time for it to harm her. It did react with the air almost immediately, but that still took more than zero time so didn't have time to hurt her.

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><p><strong>The Landguard and the rest were trapped inside the gems. Wouldn't they be stuck in the time dilation too?<strong>

No. Time dilation is an effect of the gravity from the black hole and gravity propagates at the speed of light. (This is physics, not a house rule.) The antimatter blast happened between the gems and the point where the black hole was created; as such, the blast front reached and destroyed the gems before the time-dilation-causing gravity got there. The souls were freed before time dilation set in.

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><p><strong>Neklos's portfolio sense notifies him when any mortal dies, and can see up to 20 weeks into the past and the future. Why didn't it alert him when Suze's antimatter-bombed the gems, thereby killing Thomas and the others?<strong>

There are actually a lot of reasons for this. You can choose the one(s) you like best, because they are all correct.

1) Death in D&D is defined as: "[t]he character's hit points are reduced to -10, his Constitution drops to 0, or he is killed outright by a spell or effect. The character's soul leaves his body." An antimatter explosion is not a 'spell or effect', it doesn't reduce your Constitution, and the rules don't specify a number or type of damage dice for it, so it can't reduce your HP to -10. As such, it doesn't actually give you the 'dead' status condition, which is what Neklos's portfolio sense triggers on.

2) But, ok, the previous version requires a pretty darn strict reading of the rules and maybe that's too cheesy, so ignore it. Trap the Soul pulls the soul and the life force out of the body; I'm considering that to be death of the 'killed outright by a spell' variety, meaning that Neklos killed them when he put them in the gems. Therefore, his portfolio sense notified him about the deaths 20 weeks ago, and Neklos didn't get any warning about them being killed by the antimatter bomb because he'd already killed them. When the soul gems shattered, the heroes' material bodies would have reformed but been instantly vaporized with no perceptible time in between that would allow Neklos's portfolio sense to alert him.

3) In point of fact, however, it wouldn't have mattered if the antimatter had counted as killing Thomas and the others. The exact wording on Portfolio Sense is:

"Greater deities automatically sense any event that involves their portfolios [i.e., Neklos senses every death], regardless of the number of people involved. In addition, their senses extend one week into the past and one week into the future for every divine rank they have. [Neklos has 20 divine ranks.] When a deity senses an event, it merely knows that the event is occurring and where it is. The deity receives no sensory information about the event. Once a deity notices an event, it can use its remote sensing power to perceive the event."

The Remote Sensing power says:

"As a standard action, a deity of rank 1 or higher can perceive everything within a radius of one mile per rank around any of its worshipers, holy sites, or other objects or locales sacred to the deity. This supernatural effect can also be centered on any place where someone speaks the deity's name or title for up to 1 hour after the name is spoken, and at any location when an event related to the deity's portfolio occurs."

Notice that the _portfolio sense_ extends into the future, but the _remote sensing_ ability does not. If we suppose that Suze's antimatter bomb killed Thomas and the others (which it didn't, since they were already dead), then Neklos would have gone into the encounter knowing that a bunch of people died, but not knowing who they were, what killed them, what condition they were in before being killed, or anything else. In short, nothing that would alarm him, since he was going there with every intention of killing a bunch of people.

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><p><strong>How much time did you spend figuring out the details of the SuzeNeklos confrontation?**

A _lot._

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><p><strong>How much of Jake's two year rule is left?<strong>

"The Two Year Emperor, Book I: The Drauga War" took three weeks. (Actually, if we're being precise, it took 20 days.) He's still got 101 weeks to rule.

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><p><strong>Will resurrection still be dangerous now that Neklos is gone?<strong>

No.

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><p><strong>What exactly happened with Afi and the shard of Neklos that was in his soul?<strong>

Afi used Mindscrape to delete the mind of one of his Ice Assassins and 'uploaded' a copy of himself into the body. The upload then left the throne room (and returned to the Prime Material Plane, although that wasn't shown on camera), and Afi modified his own memory so that he himself didn't know he'd made a copy of himself—that way, when Neklos showed up, he wouldn't be able to find out about the copy.

The original Afi is now permanently trapped in time dilation; he's not coming back.

_Correction: The above was a mistake on my part. When I went back and thought about it, I realized he'd been standing beside Suze and Jake, which put him within the blast radius of the antimatter explosion. His body would therefore have been destroyed before the gravity of the black hole could reach him and trap him in time dilation. And before you ask, no, this does not count as 'death' and therefore would not have tripped Neklos's portfolio sense. A lich isn't dead when you destroy its mortal body, it's simply forced back to its phylactery._

The uploaded version, however, is wandering around the Prime Material with all of his normal intelligence, memories, spellcasting abilities...and no soul. As such, he is no longer affected by Neklos's power. Granted, that's pretty moot since Neklos isn't around anymore, but Afi couldn't know for sure that the plan would work and the upload would have remained free no matter what.

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><p><strong>Is Suze now the Goddess of Death? Will she have to fight the other gods for the portfolio?<strong>

Yes and sort of, respectively. Yes, she is the Goddess of Death. The other gods will not challenge her to head-to-head combat...they avoid that under all but the most dire circumstances, since it tends to draw in each god's allies until it's an all our war and then various gods might end up with a really serious case of being dead. Instead of calling her out physically, they will do the standard proxy war tactics—attempt to undermine her support base by getting rid of her worshippers.

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><p><strong>Why did the gods accept Suze's promotion to Goddess?<strong>

She was a good compromise candidate. None of them were willing to let any other god have such a powerful portfolio, but they figured that a newly-elevated mortal wouldn't know how to use the power well enough to be much of a threat. Also, the fact that she seemed timid was a bonus; she'd be much easier to bully around. (They might be surprised on that front.)

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><p><strong>Why didn't Jake and the others use Programmed Amnesia or Mindscrape to conceal their plans from Afi? Didn't they know that he would Mindscrape them? Why did only Suze think of this?<strong>

Jake and the others _did_ think of it. They deliberately didn't do it, because they had nothing to hide. They _wanted_ Afi to see that they were completely sincere and they had no intention of double-crossing him. They had a common enemy and weren't interested in messing around.

As to why Suze did it—she _did_ have secrets that she wanted kept from both Afi and from her own friends / companions. Specifically, she didn't want anyone knowing that she'd been through the FLEA and was suddenly a super-high-level spellcaster.

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><p><strong>What alignment is Suze? How old is she?<strong>

Neutral good and 19.

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><p><strong>What is the XP reward for defeating (albeit not killing) a god?<strong>

There isn't one, sorry.

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><p><strong>Is it a problem that Afi escaped?<strong>

Probably. He now knows everything that Jake does—physics, chemistry, the rules of D&D, etc. Still, he's over that whole 'rule the world' thing; he was only doing it because Neklos insisted.

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><p><strong>If Afi knows everything that Jake knows, does this mean he has a copy of Jake's value system and reasoning for arriving at it? <strong>

The other questions on this list are FAQs, which is why I'm answering them. This one was asked by fortycakes over on Reddit's /r/rational forum, and was sufficiently interesting that I wanted to repeat it.

Yes, Afi knows Jake's values and why he holds them, but there is no personal attachment. The knowledge gained from a Mindscrape is something like the Brainopedia—it's a reference work that volunteers answers as needed, not another person integrated into your own consciousness. If Afi wanted to examine those arguments in detail, and if Jake's arguments were sufficiently coherent, then Afi might be convinced, but he won't simply be forcibly changed to align with Jake's beliefs.

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><p><em><strong>Author's Note, supplemental:<strong>__ I'm selling spinoff stories over on GreenDogPress (greendogpress. blogspot. com). The first item is a novelette entitled "One Hot Night"; as of this writing, it's on sale for $1 (price may increase later). It does NOT use any copyrighted material, meaning that it's legal for me to sell._

_I intend to keep 2YE itself free, and I have no intention of stopping until the story is done, regardless of how many sales of spinoff work I do or don't get. _

_The blurb for "One Hot Night" is:_

"In a society without death, Ingfred is 20 years old and has no prospects. All the good jobs are filled by undying masters of their craft, and it's hard to be taken seriously when you are, compared to everyone around you, an infant. Fortunately, he has a solution: undergo an illegal transformation and sell the memory to The Experiental Herald for a ridiculous sum.

There's two problems: how can Ingfred convince a powerful wizard to risk his mage license and his freedom to help with such a crazy plan? And, once that's done...how will Ingfred deal with the law?"

_Thanks to tdwhitta for helping me produce this blurb._


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